Hi Ralph,
At 11:01 PM 8/4/2003 -0400, Ralph Droms wrote:
Bob's e-mail to the ipng mailing list used to judge WG consensus on deprecating site-local addresses asked:
The question is:
Should we deprecate IPv6 site-local unicast addressing?
Valid responses are:
"YES -- Deprecate site-local unicast addressing". "NO -- Do not deprecate site-local unicast addressing".
which I read to be pretty clearly independent of consideration of any replacement mechanism. In response to Bob's question on the WG mailing list, the YESes followed the format from Bob's e-mail - that is, those YESes were unconditional "YES -- deprecate SL", not any form of "YES -- deprecate SL after a suitable replacement has been defined".
If you look at the results of this poll, though, you will see that there was some significant resistance to deprecating site-local addressing, without regard to a replacement (about 1/4 of the people who responded to the poll indicated "NO").
Fortunately (if you favor finding consensus), many of the people who expressed an opinion against the idea of deprecating site-local addresses with no replacement did indicate (in their poll response, or in other e-mail to the list) that they thought that site-local addressing had serious problems, but that we should only deprecate unicast site-local if we could provide an alternative for local addressing.
In reading through the e-mail to the list (in response to the poll, and other discussion), Bob and I determined that there was a consensus to deprecate site-local addressing AND provide a replacement. And, that is what our consensus call said.
Our consensus call indicated that work to deprecate site-locals and replace them would be undertaken "in parallel". Some people have since asked, quite reasonably I think, whether "in parallel" implies that these things would happen at the same time, or if one could/should complete before the other (i.e. do we deprecate then replace, replace and then deprecate, or do both at once).
It hasn't been clear (to me and Bob, anyway) from the discussion what the consensus of the WG is regarding this question, which is why Bob has posed a question to the list to try to clarify things.
If we don't reach any consensus on the order/dependency, then I guess we will continue with all of the work items "in parallel" and determine when/if we get WG consensus to advance each document to the IESG. It would be easier to plan WG milestones and focus our work, however, if we understand what order/dependencies the WG would like to place on these work items.
Furthermore, based on the record of the question from the minutes of the SF meeting and the question put to the ipng mailing list, how was this conclusion arrived at:
A fourth alternative is to not replace site-local addresses in any form, but I think the working group has made it clear that this is not a reasonable alternative.
I don't think that you could draw this conclusion from the discussion at the SF meeting, but it has been pretty clear on the mailing list that we do not have consensus to deprecate site-local addressing unless we also develop a replacement.
In Vienna, the working group did accepted a replacement proposal as a WG work item, which also seems to indicate that the WG has consensus to replace site-locals with an alternative local addressing mechanism.
Margaret
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